Today I discovered where all the rich hang out in
Malta. There’s a place called Portomaso
north of Sliema close to the Hilton, where plush apartments surround
horseshoe-like, huge private cruisers moored cosily together. There are expensive restaurants at each
corner and on one of the cruisers a well-dressed couple examined an expensive gold-topped
bottle of bubbly. I find myself wanting
to slap this rich man, eating a lobster, on the head hard as I go past. Don’t know why the rich bring out a desire
in me to howl, “come the revolution, you’ll be first against the wall!”
I suspect it stems from when I was four and lived in a
refuge camp. My family had emigrated
from Ireland in the 1960s and because of the housing shortage we found
ourselves in a refugee camp called Bradfield Park in Sydney. My best friend was a Romanian who spoke no
English. We conversed at length despite
no shared language, children just find a way.
It was a rough neighbourhood, our next-door neighbour, an aborigine,
stabbed his wife to death and was dragged off by five large armed and cursing
Australian policemen. Our main problem
was not knife fights but bins. Our bin
which was put out on a weekly basis was being stolen. My father in desperation rigged an elaborate trap for the thief
involving bells and ropes. Of course,
being four and extremely talkative I spent the week telling all the neighbours
of the exciting trap and needless to say the bin walked again. As punishment, my Dad took me with him on a
walkabout in the camp to find our missing bin.
We covered miles and I began to feel really sorry about the whole
business as my father became more quiet and withdrawn the further we went. Eventually, we returned home binless and a
shocked Dad told the rest of the family that we actually lived in the affluent
part of the camp! In terrified tones he
described to them all, the real poverty that existed just streets away. It was scary, we thought we were at the
bottom, the very dregs, but in the camp structure we were practically “rich
bastards”.
You get used to living behind large ten foot chain fencing,
I, as a small child naively thought it kept the bad guys out. Never twigged it was to keep us refugees
in. I have another memory of playing in
the dry soil making mud pies with a cup of water in front of our shack. My brother, who was six at the time, shouted at me not to move. Something in his tone frightened me, so I
looked around slowly to find a much older boy standing with a boulder held
above my head. He told me if I moved
he’d drop it. My brother, shouted frantic
instructions to me, “when I count to three, run!” He counted one, two and then before he got to three and I could
run to safety the boulder was dropped and got me hard on the head. I was carried home bleeding by my father and
was lucky I inherited by far the most useful genetic trait in our family – an
exceptionally hard head.
